Managing the Negatives of Work/Life Balance

There’s a lot of talk these days about work/life balance, and how GenY will revolutionise the workplace by demanding this be a part of their jobs, rather than a bonus from a very generous employer.

In fact, it’s simply that it’s hard to escape your home life when you’re at work. What is rarely discussed are the negatives of promoting work/life balance, and in particular among ‘upper management’ (but I’ll get to that). I’ve mentioned in a previous post about how there is now almost a seamless integration between your work life and your home life – we take a lot of work home with us, and we bring a lot of home to work. You have a mobile phone you’re expected to answer because that’s what it’s there for. Your partner has your direct line number at work. You need to ask for time off because your child has just gotten sick in the middle of the day – despite your important business meeting. On your way to work to earn your living you think about how you need a pay rise just to meet your rising mortgage and electricity bills, then continue to think about that fact as you sit in a meeting about quarterly company profits. When you go home, you talk to your partner about those company profits and how they are obviously earning enough money to give you a pay rise, but think that maybe you need to show more initiative, so skip dinner with the family to work on your next big report.

I’ve worked for a few small start-up online businesses, and find the work/life balance of management can be highly detrimental to other employees. Whether this is true or not in very big businesses I am yet to personally experience, but this is what I have been exposed to:

My experience was in a case where the owners were both going through divorces as well as some other personal scandals, and this was often brought into the workplace. Employees were asked to hide personal information about those situations from other employees who were family members of the owners; and when the divorce wasn’t going well, that anger and frustration came straight into the boardroom and was taken out on the employees who were trying to make these people enough money to pay their eventual divorce settlement.

You would think owners/managers/executives would know better, and would set a better example, but often they don’t. They are usually the ones who get the most flexible work/life balance arrangements, and I find that means that more of their home life has a chance of seeping into work. It is not uncommon these days to see children waiting around in offices, inadvertantly overhearing personal conversations on the phone, and having everyone’s dirty laundry being openly aired in front of the entire staff.

I hope to become a manager one day, and firmly believe that all managers should receive some kind of training on how to effectively manage and respond to the changes in the workplace (and employees as individuals) that a greater push for work/life balance is creating. You need to know how to handle that receptionist who comes in bawling because her boyfriend just dumped her, or that middle level programmer whose wife is calling to find out where he is and complaining that he is always coming home late, or yourself, when you go through the stresses of life that happen at 7:30am right before you leave for work. People skills and I suppose ‘emotional management’ skills will be more important than ever in a future manager, as if you want happy, productive employees, you simply won’t be able to ignore how your company will need to support your employees through lifes ups and downs.

Managers will need to learn how to still get the best out of their employees despite what is going on in their lives. Get used to the fact that your employees will still come to work, gather around the kettle and air their grievances. They will sit at their desk and work, but the anxiety levels they are sure to experience will affect their mood, productivity and quality of output, which in turn will likely affect all your other employees. Learning how to register what is going on with an individual without becoming Dr Phil is a fine art, and if you simply choose to push your employees harder, you will only make bad situations worse.

If you’ve been a manager for a long time, and don’t know what I am talking about, ask me for some specific examples from my workplaces about how poorly a distressed employee performs, and how negatively this impacts the rest of the staff.